Flight (17 page)

With a smirk, Jack gestured to his clothes,
“Do I look like someone who would go to prep school?”

“No, you’re right. But, my dad, even though
he doesn’t spend much time in this world, still might smell
something snooty on you. But, it’s either up there or down in the
basement.”

“What’s down there?”

“Storage and a utility room.”

“No super?”

“No the building’s too small. They use
Central-Super.”

Jack leered, “Down.”

Although Prissi knew that she should be in
shock, she found herself happy that Jack was teasing her. She
turned to see if the lobby was empty before beckoning with a jerk
of her head for Jack to follow her. When she stopped to put her
thumb on the lock sensor, Prissi felt Jack’s breath on her
neck.

As soon as Prissi showed Jack the cage where
she had spent the afternoon, he immediately said, “This is epic. I
can incubate here. But what do I do if someone lands in our love
nest?””

Jack’s words made Prissi’s face flush. To
create a diversion she asked, “What is going on? Why are you
hiding?”

Jack ignored her.

“I’ll stack these boxes and push them close
to the back wall where it’s darker. I can hide there.”

Jack was still moving boxes when he said,
“Hmmmm. Still not much cover. I’d be a rat in a cage.”

“But, no one comes down here.”

“It only takes one.”

Jack walked out of the cage to the end of the
long room where he yanked on a door handle.

“What’s in here?”

“The heat and stuff…electricity.”

As he turned back, Jack shook his head.

“Not good.”

Prissi’s shoulders slumped.

“I’d better go.”

A wave of feeling, part panic and part pain,
washed over Prissi. With a huge effort, she conquered both.

“No. Don’t go. Not yet, anyway. No one will
come. I’ll go get food and be right back. What do you like?”

Jack, seemingly startled by the kindness,
shrugged his narrow slouchy shoulders, “Anything. It’s been
awhile.”

As Prissi raced up the basement stairs, she
hit herself in the forehead with her fist. She ran through the
lobby, caught a wing as she rushed through the door, flung herself
from the top of the three step stoop and beat her wings madly. As
soon as she was airborne, she dropped her left wing, pounded her
right and made a sweeping turn down 21st Street toward the lights
of Fifth Avenue three blocks away. By the time she got to the
intersection with Lexington Avenue, she was over thirty meters in
the air and moving fast; however the cold air rushing past her face
did nothing to cool the heat in her cheeks.

Prissi kept climbing as she sped her way
toward Park Avenue. When she reached sixty meters, she roared in
confusion. The teener drew up her heels, dropped her head on to
chest, folded her wings tight and did a triple somersault. She came
out of the third flip so fast that when she flared her wings to
stop her freefall, she felt the same pop in her right shoulder that
she had experienced at Bissell. She dropped her legs to increase
her drag before carefully beating her wings a half-dozen times to
make sure everything still worked.

As she walked in to the EZ-Lam Global Market,
Prissi was panting so hard she could only manage a choked As-salaam
alaykum to Jiffy Apithy, the owner’s third son, second-shift
cashier, honors student in molecular engineering at NYU-Man and,
most importantly, fellow soccer player. Prissi had spent hours of
her first months in New York playing after school and weekend
pick-up soccer games with a motley crew that included Jiffy. She
greatly respected Jiffy’s competitiveness, which, she was willing
to admit, came close to equaling her own. Prissi grabbed a tote,
and smiled at her friend before pointing toward the open deli
display at the back of the store. The smile Jiffy tossed back was
so big it was barely contained by the wide dimpled cheeks of his
perfectly round face.

In a minor miracle, there were four mbatata
biscuits left. Prissi snatched them like they were the crown
jewels. She added a zip-bag of kibbe, lentils and onions, then, put
it back as being too far-fetched, found nori-wrapped mahi-mahi and
a container of fresh water shrimp spring rolls. She grabbed two
bottles of Irn Bru, kefir and a 2 liter bottle of Arctic water. She
hefted the tote, frowned, shrugged and packed it in her imagination
before making her way back to Jiffy.

Prissi stood on the floor scale, wriggling
impatiently as Jiffy scanned her flightcard. He put her purchases
on the sale scale. The scale buzzed.

“You’re a kilo over.”

Prissi stared at the food for a second before
flaring up at Jiffy.

“C’mon, Jiffy, let it go. You know I only
live a couple of blocks away. Nothing’s going to happen from here
to there.”

When Jiffy shook his head, the combed out
hair on the top of his head swayed back and forth like sagebrush in
a breeze, “I like Noramica. I want to stay.”

Prissi tried her disgusted look.

“Zeusus, Jiffy, Malawi culture must be big on
drama.”

Jiffy’s dark eyes, always warm and friendly,
turned ice cold.

“It is not the culture in Malawi that is a
drama, it is the living…which is mostly dying.”

“I’m sorry. That was stupid…and mean.”

Prissi took out the water bottle and walked
down the aisle to put it back on its shelf. She paid and then
opened her kanga-pak to arrange her purchases in the suggested
order and orientation shown on the receipt. She bounced up and down
a couple of times to settle the pak. Half-way out the door, Prissi
turned back toward Jiffy, “Sometimes I can be very stupid.”

Jiffy stared at her with his new eyes and
waited five seconds before finally giving her a small nod of his
head.

The energized confusion Prissi had felt
flying to the market was replaced by a heavy-winged feeling of loss
on the flight back. What was it about Jack that caused her to do
stupid things, to hurt people she really liked?

An angry Prissi shoved open the basement door
and muttered, “Hey, it’s me,” but, her anger sputtered when she
opened the cage and didn’t find Jack.

“Jack? Jack?”

At first, as she listened, she heard only the
hair dryer drone of the heat pump, but then she heard a muffled
sound, like a sweeping broom. Prissi tentatively moved toward the
noise, which seemed to be coming from a cage at the far end of the
basement.

“Jack?”

Jack’s head rose from behind a wall of boxes.
Prissi snapped the padlock that secured the door. It held.

“How’d you do that?”

Jack wriggled his boomerang-shaped eyebrows
and offered Prissi a wry grin before he disappeared from view.
Prissi heard the broom noise again, then a scraping sound like a
small snow shovel cleaning a sidewalk. A second later Jack came out
from behind the low wall of boxes in the Langue cage with a small
screwdriver in his hand and a big smile across his dirty face.
Somehow, Jack’s smile made Prissi’s elbows tingle.

“The sides are pretty flimsy.”

The riled teener unzipped her kanga and
offered the mbatata muffins.

“Africa’s best.”

Jack stood still. “Africa’s best could still
be Noramica’s worst. What are they?”

Those words focused Prissi’s thoughts. The
tingle went away.

“I’m sure I can return them if they’re not to
your standards.”

Jack’s lips formed a word, but they made had
no sound. The boy slid down on his haunches and began to shove food
into his mouth.

“Sorry, though rich, I’m naïve. I just didn’t
know Africa had anything that was best.”

Instead of expelling her words, Prissi
stomped down the corridor and banged her fist against a cage.

“Are they good?”

Jack, with his cheeks bulging like a squirrel
in autumn, nodded his head.

To get rid of the excess energy that was
making her feel like gnats were biting her, Prissi stalked back and
forth in front of the cages. On one pass, she looked down and
studied how filthy Jack’s hair was. On another pass, she thought
she could smell his hair. It was kind of smoky like old bacon fat
and maybe something fishy.

Jack finished the mbatata and started on the
mahi-mahi. Despite the heat pump drone, Prissi could hear his
mewling sounds as he ate. His sounds reminded her of a litter of
kittens and, somehow, made it hard for her to breathe. She coughed
twice. When the fish was gone, Jack began shoving the spring rolls
into his mouth in a way that suddenly began to disgust her. If he
had been hurt, maybe bleeding, or covered in vomit, or had his
intestines spilling from a wound, she was sure that she would have
been willing to help him; but eating the way he was eating, with
rice noodles stuck to his chin and his jaws crushing through the
bulge of food in his mouth, was harder to accept. The eating, the
smell of his hair, the self-absorption began to revulse her.

Prissi hurried to the far wall to get away
from Jack. As she held onto the wire of the last cage taking deep
breaths, her eyes were drawn to a gray bin amid a jumble of boxes
and broken chairs. Although the light was dim, the writing
identifying the contents of the bin as schoolwork was in her
mother’s handwriting. During the half minute she stared at the
container, Prissi could not come up with a plausible reason for why
it would be there.

Feeling foolish even as she did it since she
knew what the result would be, Prissi tugged on the padlock. It did
not miraculously open. She cradled the lock in her palm as she
studied it. Like the one of her cage door, it had five numbered
wheels, which meant a possibility of 99,999 combinations. Fighting
her intuition, Prissi made herself begin at 00000, tugged, advanced
the far right rotor until it read one and tugged again. She was at
0027 when she heard Jack crush the container that had held the
spring rolls. Reluctantly, Prissi let go of the lock and walked
back down to her cage.

“This was great. The best and most I’ve eaten
since I got here.”

“Which was when?”

Even to herself, Prissi’s thought her voice
sounded like the eunuched charm that came from the venderators at
school.

“Monday night.”

“What’s going on?”

Jack’s eyes seemed to dull as he looked at
something beyond the basement door. He pinched the skin of a
cheekbone before rubbing the back of his grimy neck.

“You can ask, but I’m not sure I can give you
an answer.”

After a long silence, Prissi asked, “You’re
not running away, too, are you?”

Like a child’s charade of a steam turbine,
Jack’s shoulders rose, a hiss of air escaped his lips, and, then,
his shoulders slumped.

“Kinda. I mean my folks don’t know where I
am. But, really, I’m not running away. I hope I’m running
toward.”

“Joe?”

“Yeah. Since I kind of feel responsible that
he took off, I want to help find him.”

“How could you be responsible? I thought you
and Joe didn’t talk.”

Jack flashed his biggest smile, “We don’t.
But, it was Christmas, at my grandfather’s. There wasn’t much
choice. Better to talk about fledging and flying than some other
topics.”

When Jack waggled his eyebrows, Prissi raised
one of hers and started to call him on what she guessed was a lie.
Instead, her embarrassment over what he was insinuating, caused her
to ask, “I thought you loved to fly.”

“I do, but I like a lot of other things, too.
Part of it is just growing up. Or, maybe accepting that for the
first time in my life I didn’t get to have what I wanted.”

“Which was?”

“Play now. Fly later.”

Instead of resenting Jack’s life of privilege
and his nonchalant self-centeredness, Prissi took a deep breath,
pushed her wings far forward, and carefully slid down the cage door
to sit on the floor opposite him.

Jack continued, “Joe didn’t really have
anything against flying. In fact, I know he’d love it. Obviously,
he’d be good at it.” Jack stopped as if waiting for Prissi to say
something. He cocked his head sideways in a manner that reminded
Prissi of a crow looking at something shiny in the grass before
giving her another huge, consciously vulpine smile.

To get past the effects of his smile, Prissi
said, “But, Joe loves hockey and he wasn’t ready to give that
up.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Indirectly.”

Although he was still smiling, Jack’s eyes
locked onto Prissi’s and didn’t waver.

“Do you know where he went? That’s mostly why
I’m here. I thought he might have given you a clue about he was
going to do. I know he trusted you.”

Prissi shook her head resignedly. “No
clue.”

A couple of greasy plaits broke free from
Jack’s head when he mimicked Prissi’s action. He grabbed the ends
and began to twist them. Again, Prissi felt as though he was
expecting her to say something. There was an uncomfortable silence
until Jack leaned toward Prissi to say, “My dad told me that it
might not be long before you’ll be able to mute when you’re in your
twenties. He told me that Joe might be able to play hockey for
fifteen more years. Be in the Olympics…then fledge and do whatever
he,” Jack laughed bitterly, “or, more importantly, the family
wants.”

“Like get your butt home, now?”

“Like that.”

Prissi couldn’t contain herself, “Jack, you
know they’ve been promising that for fifty years and it hasn’t
happened. It’s like a cure for herpes or acne. Always just around
the corner, but it hasn’t happened. How would you be feeling right
now if you knew you had missed the window and never could fly? You
shouldn’t have told….”

Prissi never had a chance to finish her
sentence. Her mypod chirped. It was her father. He was worried.
When he found out that there was nothing wrong except that Prissi
had run into a friend, he wondered when she was going to be home.
Should he go out to get them something to eat? Rather than tell her
father that she was down in the basement, Prissi reassured him that
she would be home with dinner in twenty minutes.